Derb All Over

In my weekly column at Taki’s Magazine I indulge myself in some reminiscences of 1960s Liverpool. No, there are no Beatles in it (although there will be one in this week’s Radio Derb), but I try to catch some of the old Liverpool flavor—multiculturalism avant la lettre.

The pub’s male customers were a mix of Chinese merchant mariners, some naturalized Chinese who had settled permanently in the neighborhood with English wives, and some white Englishmen of the upper working and lower middle class—mechanics, owners of small businesses, clerks from the shipping companies, and such.

The females were wives and girlfriends, all white, and a small cadre of white hookers—regulars, jealous of their turf, and fond of their Chinese customers, who, as I heard them say more than once, “really know how to treat a lady.”

Meanwhile my fortnightly book review is up at The American Spectator. This too is somewhat self-indulgent, which in the context of book reviewing means letting loose with both barrels on a bad, dishonest book. I haven’t had so much fun for ages.

The book is about child-raising. The author is Alfie Kohn, whose approach is “progressive.” That’s what got my trigger finger itching.

And of course Kohn’s professed desire that we raise citizens who “question authority,” who “think critically,” who display “reflective rebelliousness,” who are “willing to be nonconformists” is perfectly bogus. He actually titles his last chapter “Raising Rebels,” and instructs us how to do that.

Yeah, right. Kohn’s progressivism is, like the Marxism that begat it, a cynical cover for totalitarian control. By all means “challenge oppressive institutions,” kids, so that Kohn and his progressive pals can seize control of those institutions. From that point on, nonconformists will be Thought Criminals.